A book excerpt from the spiritandflesh.com religion and spirituality online library.

As it is perilous for us to have a single idea, concept, expectation, or
speculation about any enigma whatsoever- for that destroys it's
enigmaticism completely- it is of great importance that we admit once and
for all that we do not understand the Great Enigma, God, and that perhaps
we will never know God, that God is categorically unknowable, and so we
must release God from limitation, and let God be immense and unreachable.

"Can you simply agree that on some of
the questions the mystery is too great ever for you to solve? Why not hold
the mystery as sacred? And why not allow the sacred to be sacred, and
leave it alone?"

God (from Conversations with God)

Can we not just leave It
alone? Can we not just let God be God? Is it so hard to accept the
impotence of our cognitive faculties, that we must continually desecrate
that which is infinitely beyond our scope, by claiming to have even the
slightest idea of what it is all about?

Let us remember the Fall, the reasons for
it, and the way of return. "Mysteries are not to be solved", suggested
Rumi, for "The eye goes blind/ when it only wants to see why."

When we finally see mystery in
all things- when we have stopped asking 'why?'- then we shall properly not
know things. And when we do not know 'things', then we shall begin to see
the one unknowable force in all things. And that unknowable force has, in
the past, been called God. But, after all, God is just a word; it is a
word for something we cannot understand.

Thus, by not-knowing, we have finally
returned the divine to unencumbered imagelessness; we return God to
freedom by releasing God from the cages we have built. We have fulfilled
the second commandment.

"And if you would know God be not
therefore

a solver of riddles."

Kahlil Gibran

It is the same with God as with
everything- there is no answer, no axiom, no truth, and no solution
...there is only riddle. There is only a solute called mystery, dis-solved
in the solution called mystery. And that mystery has simply been named
God. And "God is something that cannot be found by the mind", proclaimed
Jiddu Krishnamurti.

This is because the mind can
'know' only from one perspective, and yet it can 'unknow' from an infinity
of implausible points of view; thus the infinite radiations of The
Mystery of God are born in the spacious womb of this ignorance, and not in
the confined ovum of conceptualization.

"If you are to know God divinely," intoned
Meister Eckhart, "your own knowledge must become as pure ignorance, in
which you forget yourself and every other creature."

The Great Self (if I can use that term
without muddling up our incomprehension) cannot be contained in the
limited vessel of the mind, and thus thought must be conquered, in order
to let God be God.

The kun byed rgyal po'i mdo, speaking
from the voice of the Creator, categorically states: "Oh great
bodhisattva, listen! ...I do not teach that the objects are unrelated to
the self because the root of all things is nothing but one self, and
therefore it is impossible that the self looks at itself in terms of a
doctrinal view. Therefore it is [known as] the teaching 'no contemplation
of doctrinal views'. ...I transcend the scope of all sensory perception,
and therefore from the primordial, there is no point in theorizing Me or
in meditating upon Me. ...no doctrinal view [about Me] should be
contemplated upon. Likewise...My true nature lack[s] meaning, so do not
reflect upon a possible meaning. ... Unconceptualized I am beyond being an
object of thinking. ...The nature of the All-Creating Sovereign, mind of
perfect purity, is unborn and of a non-conceptual nature, and from it the
various objects come forth as the wonders of origination...of ceaseless
creation. ...Oh great bodhisattva, intuit this quintessential point!
Because I am totally beyond the scope of sensory perception, I am beyond
the scope of the senses, and I do not come through words. My nature is
comprehensive and dwells in the empty circle. It is explained as
non-conceptual, non-dual, and one from the primordial." [brackets are
translator's]

Once again, it is absolutely
ridiculous, and futile, to persist in trying to understand what cannot be
understood; in our highest pursuits, the mind is absolutely not the Way,
instead it is in the way.

M.L. Hawkins suggests to: "Go into the
Darkness and put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you
better than light and safer than a known way."

The 'infinite darkness', as
stated by Hawkins above, is the mind's humble reckoning with the infinite
enigma, and only from that humility is the truly magnificent seen for what
it truly is: mind-boggling and ineffable. Only in the full appreciation
and assimilation of this consciousness do we justify, and not blasphemy,
the unsurpassable immensity of the unknowable word God.

"For it is man's function to
contemplate the works of god;

and for this purpose was he made that
he might view the universe with wondering awe, and come to know its
maker."

Hermetica.

The 'leap of faith' we have
heard so much about is therefore not like some blind, cowardly hope
directed towards the expectation that some outward, omnibenevolent force
will intercede and protect us (which it might, though that is beyond what
we're considering here), but faith, absolute faith, is the acceptance of
walking with eyes fully open into the infinite darkness; faith is without
expectation, hope, petition, or piety, or it is not faith, it is merely
belief. Belief is a characteristic of concept, faith is a characteristic
of mystery; for 'belief' is the acceptance of something we do not know,
whereas 'faith' is the acceptance that we do not know.

Therefore let us not belittle
what is incomprehensible ...by claiming that we comprehend it. This is not
simply my own little nudge in your ribs to 'give God his due', so to
speak, it is actually of pragmatic importance so as to fully realize all
that has been discussed here; for just as we can receive the knowable only
by 'knowing', so it is that we can receive the Unknowable only by
not-knowing.

"Truth comes to the thought of those
who know him beyond thought, not to those who think it can be attained by
thought. …It is
conceived of by him whom it is not conceived of; He by whom It is
conceived of, knows it not. It is not understood by those who understand
It. It is understood by those who understand it not."

Kena Upanishad

Seeking the Mystery of God is like seeking
the mystery in all things- it is not so much a matter of seeking, but of a
ubiquitous, unconditional, objectless, intelligent not‑knowing. For the
Unknowable is "Thou of whom no words can tell, no tongue can speak, whom
silence only can declare", asserts the Hermetica.

Thus Elaine Pagels, author of The Gnostic
Gospels, suggests, "...one cannot attain knowledge of the Unknown God.
Any attempt to do so, to grasp the incomprehensible, hinders 'the
effortlessness which is within you'." Pagels then quotes from Allogenes,
one of the codices from The Nag Hammadi Library, which runs:
"...(whoever) sees (God) as he is in every respect, or would say that he
is something like gnosis has sinned against him...because he did
not know God."

Thus the true 'gnosis' of the Unknowable is
actually 'agnosticism' in its most literal sense: a-gnosis, the absence of
knowing.

That is, when we unknow God and
everything, then we will see God in everything, and we will not know what
the word God means, and then we will know God.

Knowledge is necessarily relative. Only non-separative
incomprehension can attain the Absolute.

"It is...clear",
states Carl Jung, "that the God-image corresponds to a definite complex of
psychological facts, and is thus a quantity which we can operate with; but
what God is in himself remains a question outside the competence of all
psychology. …it must now be admitted that things exist in the psyche about
which we know little or nothing at all...and
that they possess at least as much reality as the things of the physical
world which ultimately we do not understand either."

"Whatsoever you can think about God is
not going to be God;

it is simply going to be thought."

Osho

Following from this thought,
Osho then suggested: "The ultimate is a mystery, then life becomes a life
of wonder. ...And wherever you find mystery there is God. The more you
know, the less you will be aware of God; the less you know, the closer God
will be to you. If you don't know anything, if you say with absolute
confidence 'I don't know' if this 'I don't know' comes from the deepest
core of your being, then God will be in your very core, in the very beat
of your heart. And then poetry arises...then one falls in love with this
tremendous mystery that surrounds you."

Everyone must come to their own
incomprehension of God their own way: whether it be from looking up at the
night sky and witnessing the vast expanse of the unimaginably immense
universe, or perhaps from viewing the marvels of the natural world, or
mankind's mysterious ways, or by recognizing the inconceivable inward
universe we all carry around with us. No matter how wonder comes, it
matters only that we accept and revere it.

The authors of The Kybalion state:
"The Hermetists believe
and teach that THE ALL, 'in itself', is and must ever be UNKNOWABLE. They
regard all the theories, guesses and speculations of the theologians and
metaphysicians regarding the inner nature of THE ALL, as but the childish
efforts of mortal minds to grasp the secret of the Infinite. Such efforts
have always failed and will always fail, from the very nature of the task.
One pursuing such inquiries travels around and around in the labyrinth of
thought, until he is lost. He is like a squirrel which frantically runs
around and around the circling treadmill wheel of his cage, travelling
ever and yet reaching nowhere- at the end a prisoner still, and standing
just where he started."

Now, if we are reluctant to believe the
adults who have been continuously quoted here, perhaps we should listen to
what comes out of 'the mouths of babes', so to speak, and hear from a
little girl named Anna. She says: "When you make Mister God really,
really, really big, then you really, really, really, don't understand
Mister God- then you do. ...Mister God keeps on shedding bits all the way
through your life until the time comes when you admit freely and honestly
that you don't understand Mister God at all. At this point you have let
Mister God be his proper size- and wham!- there he is, laughing at you."

I suggest to anyone doubting the genius, and
inherent spiritual vision of children, that they pick up the marvelous
little book from which this last quote arises- Mister God, This is Anna-
which is the true story of a four year old girl who was found abandoned on
the docks in London, and who continually spouted the most profound and
simple truths, exposing the imperfections of dogma and the availability of
God to anyone open enough to allow the magnitude of the mystery of God in.

"Where he's concerned there are no
boundaries.

You walk all your life, this one and
the next, trying to reach him, but the blessed fellow has no end."

Nikos Kazantzakis

As we have seen, it is the
original innocence (not original sin), and wondering vision of children
that finds the ever-present connection with God, devoid of the hindrance
of learned ideas, and the mist of rules.

This 'shedding bits', as little Anna called
it, is the essence of the art of forgetting- the continual removing of
obstacles until nothing is left. Sri Nisargaddata Maharaj furthers this
'shedding', stating: "Whoever goes there, disappears. It is unreachable by
words, or mind. You may call it God, or Parabrahman, or Supreme
Reality, but these are names given by the mind. It is the nameless,
contentless, effortless and spontaneous state, beyond being and not
being."

Joel Goldsmith expands on this, stating: "No
one is ever going to find God until he is stripped of all his concepts of
God, until he leaves behind every synonym for God he has ever heard and
launches forth into the unknown to discover the Unknowable. There is no
such thing as a thought about God or a concept of God that is correct...
Nothing we can think about God is truth; nothing we can read in a book
about God is truth, because these represent merely limited human opinions
about God."

"There is nothing you can know about
God that is God. There is no idea of God that you can entertain that is
God. There is no possible thought that you can have about God that is
God."

Joel Goldsmith

Here we meet with Goldsmith's sedulous
refusal to grant God any knowable attributes, which he so categorically
assimilated into his occasional exegeses on Divine Unknowability.

Similarly, quoting an ancient
hymn, Stepan Stulginsky writes: "Thou art One and in the secret of Thy
unity the wisest of men are lost, because they know it not. ...Thou art
existent; but the understanding and vision of mortals cannot attain to Thy
existence, nor determine for Thee the Where, the How, and the Why. ...Thou
art existent, and Thy existence is so profound and secret that none can
penetrate and discover Thy secrecy." Stulginsky then goes on to state: "In
all legends and hymns it is pointed that an Omnipresent, Eternal,
Boundless, and Immutable Principle transcends the power of human
conception and could only be dwarfed by any human expression or
similitude. Therefore it is considered that any reasoning about That is
impossible... any judgements about That will inevitably be but a
limitation of It. Grandeur and beauty of Infinity do not fit in our
limited imagination or terms. They must stay in the limits of the
ineffable. ...Let's find our place in the Great Cosmic Reality, which is
not perverted with a mirage of the obviousity."

Only the finite can be known,
not the infinite; we may be able to identify certain aspects of the
infinite, which are its finitudes, but that should not trick us into
believing we know the whole of it. How could we? It is limitless. No
matter how much we know (and we know very little) there is always a
limitless amount we do not know, for even if we take away from infinity
all that we know, there is no less of the infinity that we still do not
know (i.e. ∞-1= ∞).

Hence reductionism (by which I mean reason,
logic, or the knowing of 'separate' things) must necessarily fail to grasp
the full picture, for, as we all know from the study of complete systems,
as stated earlier: the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
Therefore we cannot look at a piece of the puzzle and claim to understand
the puzzle; we must look not at the parts and say "these are only parts"
we must look at the parts and say "there are no parts", there is only an
unknowable whole.

The realization of this would lead Goldsmith
into a respectable attempt at defining what in fact cannot be defined. He
offers: "When every concept had been brushed aside, I was left with the
term 'the Infinite Invisible'. Why 'the Infinite Invisible?' Because the
Infinite Invisible did not mean anything that I could understand. Neither
you nor I can grasp the Infinite; neither you nor I can see the Invisible.
The Infinite Invisible is a term that denotes something which cannot be
comprehended by the finite mind. That does not mean, however, that the
Infinite Invisible is the correct term for God. It is correct for me,
because it provides me with a term which my mind can encompass. That
satisfies me. If I could grasp the meaning of the Infinite Invisible, it
would be within range of my human comprehension, and I do not want that
kind of God."

"He, the Self, is to be described as
No, no!

He is incomprehensible, for he cannot
be comprehended."

Khandogya Upanishad

It is only necessary, then, for us to
relinquish our singular perspectives and embrace instead the 'whole' as
the mystery which it is, by acknowledging that we perceive only within the
limitedness of our 'place' or 'context' within the whole; which is to say,
we cannot understand the whole, for 'all is One', and this 'One' is so
incredibly huge that only a mind which perceives everything at once could
understand everything, and since our minds do not encompass the all, we
perceive partially, not impartially. It is in recognizing these blinders-
that we can see very little of the immense magnitude of the all- that we
allow the infinite mystery to exist behind them. The Mystery is One Huge
Mystery. Let our actions and understandings be founded upon this
antecedent. For if we do not perceive in toto, and we do not, we
simply re-ceive a part. Impartiality, then, is the acceptance of our
limitation within limitlessness; it is accepting that the whole is unknown
by us, and therefore every partial perspective is suspect of fraud.

When we have given God back his
or her rightful being- which is to say, his or her unknowability- then
what happens is that we begin to also find out our own proper place in the
cosmos; when the event (God) which is so important to our lives becomes
impossible to understand, then we also become impossible to understand,
after all we were 'created in his own image'. And if that image is beyond
our imagination, then we must also be beyond our own imagination.

"Once His attributes are exhausted, no
one will have the energy to forge Him new ones; and the creature having
assumed, then rejected, them will go and rejoin in nothingness, his
loftiest invention: his Creator."

E.M. Cioran

When God's attributes are gone,
our own attributes are gone, and only then is it possible for the two
mysteries to blend into One; before this absolute unknowing occurred- when
we 'knew' God and ourselves- we saw them as distinct, different entities-
for that was the only way to 'know' them (i.e. by separating them), but
when we finally 'unknow' God and ourselves, only then, when the lines of
division vanish, can the separate entities merge into One.

Henry Miller described this confluence, with
a description of Proust's inner struggle, when he wrote: "It was a return
to the labyrinth, a desire to bury himself deeper and deeper in the self.
And this self was for him composed of a thousand different entities all
attached by experience to a mysterious seed-like Self which he refused to
know."

Thus anything we say or write about the
'great unknowable', which is life, is incorrect. In the attempt to define
life in any way, we steal its beauty from ourselves.

For, in fact, mystery preceded God. Hence
June Singer asserts: "There is One, beyond Jehovah, beyond Elohim, beyond
all knowing, whose nature may be contemplated but not grasped. ...[For]
before there was matter or any created thing, or any Creator to conceive
of creation; before all that, there was Mystery."

In the beginning was Mystery.

At the quintessential point of openness-
when the conditioned mind forgets itself completely- that is when the
little being ends, judgement ceases, and the great emptiness occurs which
encompasses everything completely; at this point, where duality dissolves
away, Jiddu Krishnamurti would say, "the observer is the observed"; a
classical Hindu saint would say- "I am That"; in colloquial terms we would
simply state, "I am the all and the everything"; And Christ would say, "I
and the Father are One". For at this point God now recognizes Him or
Herself in you, and as you, and as the Creator of all that is Created,
which is naught but God at every moment, living in and as the Mystery of
Godness.

But perhaps we have arrived at
this supposition too quickly, and have jumped briefly into the topical
agenda of the final chapter. Let us go no further than to finish with a
few more quick sorties into the future. Let us re-enter the Garden, let us
stay there.

"When we walk to the edge of all the
light we have and take the step into the darkness of the unknown we must
believe one of two things will happen- there will be something solid for
us to stand on, or we will be taught how to fly."

Claire Morris

And, more importantly, as we shall see in a
very short time, when we leap off into the unknown, we ...become one with
the unknown. That is: "Man is My mystery, and I am his mystery...", stated
Baha'u'llah, in the Kitab-i-lquan.

All is one mystery, we need only recognize
this, and be it. Realizing this, Clarice Lispector stated of one of
her characters: "Because in one perfect moment the world had become whole
again, even with its ancient mystery- except that this time, before the
enigma had closed...[she] had put herself inside of it, just as enigmatic
as the enigma."